Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year

Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year

Macdonald is the author of books that palpably enrich and illuminate.
He has been a brilliant editor of several of Berlioz’s biggest and
most textually challenging works, and his English edition of the
Traité d’instrumentation, one of the most instructive of
19th-century composers’ texts (at least as much so as anything by
Wagner), is indispensable. He has written widely on 19th-century music
in general, and his short monograph on Scriabin, now more than thirty
years old, remains the only decent introduction to that underrated
composer in English, or perhaps in any language. In all these
writings, Macdonald brings to bear that rarest skill of any serious
writer on music: the ability to talk about it not as some arcane
technical discipline but as a direct articulation of thought and
feeling, and the defining activity of those who practise it.